Some of my recurring Calendar events consist of lists of entries that get frequently updated. In the particular case of concern here, in the course of time a string such as “abcd1234” was changed to “abcd12345”, then later again to “abcd123456”. I would expect “abcd1234” and “abcd12345” to be gone into oblivion, especially as when editing an event I always select ‘This and future’ or, occasionally, ‘This’, but never ‘All’.
Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case. Searching the drive with a tool like FAF (Find Any File) → Text content/contains phrase/cd1234 results in the following files turning up: event_data.dat, event_data.dat-wal, event_index.dat-wal and event_index.dat, all of which are located in ~/Library/Application Support/eM Client/Local Folders/. Opening them in a text editor reveals not only “abcd123456”, but also the two “abcd1234” and “abcd12345” inside the text. In other words, these files appear to be a sort of backup of versions of Calendar events that have long been dismissed — unencrypted backups that can easily read by anyone that happens to have access to my machine. Not desirable.
It seems that only the past occurrences of non-recurrent events get deleted (which time lapse?), not those of recurrent events: going back throughout the years, I found current recurrent events way before I began using eMC, and maybe even before eMC even existed; for example, on 01.01.2007, the event mentioned above, which contains “abcd123456”. Whether this date is a “retroactive limit” proper to eMC (similar to Apple’s 1970 or Microsoft’s 1904) or it’s the date the event was created in my previous mail client, I cannot tell, but what’s relevant is that what shows up when opening it on 01.01.2007 is the text of today’s up-to-date variant.
Is there something I’m missing, or can this be remedied, a clean-up of sorts?
Hi! Any .dat files you find contain eM Client’s database data – this is the actual state of your database, not a backup. This includes past events unless you’ve deleted them. The software doesn’t automatically clean up undeleted events, as that would interfere with your calendar data. Specifically, since you’re not editing recurring events using the “All” option, past events will remain as you originally created them.
Regarding encryption, we encrypt account credentials, but other data protection is at your discretion and depends on your device setup. For more comprehensive protection, we recommend using Mac’s FileVault, for example.
This includes past events unless you’ve deleted them. The software doesn’t automatically clean up undeleted events, as that would interfere with your calendar data. Specifically, since you’re not editing recurring events using the “All” option, past events will remain as you originally created them.
Just one question in this context: apart from selecting “All”, is there a way to tell the calendar to erase all events, or even single events, prior to a certain date?
Could you elaborate on why the “All” option isn’t suitable for your needs in this case? It seems like the most straightforward approach: adjusting the start date would essentially remove past events, and since you don’t need to keep them, it should accomplish your goal.
The example I gave (my “security issue”) concerned one specific recurrent event that I’ve had running for at least 15 years. I have opened the next coming occurrence as “All”, made a couple of small changes and saved. Its start date is correct. But I can see that the previous occurrences, each with their own start dates whether it’s from last month or from half-a-year ago, are still showing and haven’t changed one bit. What is it I didn’t understand?
Then, there’s the fact that I have dozens and dozens of events, some of which were created up to 20 years ago and imported when I began using eMC. Of course I have no way of knowing which ones, if any, present “security issues” like the one I discovered. It would be unbelievably tedious to open them one by one and do whatever is needed to “clean-up their past.” Which is why I was wondering if there was a way to do it all in one go. At any rate, it requires that I get the first point straight.
Just in case you wonder, I had to disable FV and resort to other security options, due to some software incompatibility. But the rest of the system is fully up to norm.
Could you please send us the specific event as an .ics file, if you don’t mind? You can right-click > Save As, or Forward > to [email protected]. Alternatively, if you could recreate this exact behavior (unchanged occurrences despite the edit) using a test event, please send that. I would expect the changes to take effect.
There is no automatic cleanup, but I thought of another workaround in the absence of a native feature for this purpose, i this is a high priority for you. You could create a search folder using the search bar, based on a specific time period (using the “Before” date). Then, you can multi-select all resulting events and delete them in bulk.
